All those genocide men of 1971

They never spoke of the mass murders they committed on 25 March 1971 and in the following nine months. Many of them wrote books; they led peaceful lives when they went back to their country, with some of them reinventing themselves in public life.

But none of them --- Yahya Khan, Abdul Hamid Khan, Tikka Khan, AAK Niazi, Rao Farman Ali, Khadim Hussain Raja, SGMM Peerzada, Siddiq Salik and all those others --- ever spoke of the Bengalis they had killed, of the genocide they launched and presided over between 25 March and 16 December 1971. Tikka Khan once made the laughable statement to a visiting Bengali journalist that on the night between 25 and 26 March, only two Bengalis had died in crossfire. 

Years later, speaking to a group of Bengali scholar-researchers at his home in Rawalpindi, Rao Farman Ali brazenly denied that he had any role in the murder of Bengalis. It was a lie, for Farman Ali was one of those who planned the genocide and who played an instrumental role in the killing of Bengali intellectuals in the dying days of Pakistan in Bangladesh.

And yet there are the stories of some simple soldiers who were sent to Bangladesh to kill Hindus --- and this was the instruction from their officers --- only to find that it was both Muslims and Hindus that their compatriots were killing all over an occupied Bangladesh. Some of these young men went back home from the prisoner-of-war camps in India and lost themselves in penance for the cruelty they perpetrated a thousand miles away from their homes.

As we observe Genocide Day today, it is of critical importance that we recall the tragedy which befell us per courtesy of a marauding Pakistan army on 25 March 1971. It was a night of betrayal. It was that dark moment when a president decided to shoot his own people, when an army meant to guard the country's frontiers initiated a pogrom against the citizens of the country. Overall, on 25 March those who led the state of Pakistan made it brutally and darkly clear that political authority would not pass into the hands of the elected leader of the country, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

On the night between 25 and 26 March, Dhaka was put to the torch by the soldiers. The university, the very symbols of Bengali nationalism, Bangabandhu's home, the streets --- all came under organised assault. The overseas journalists who managed to escape the army dragnet and stayed back, in hiding, were horrified at the scale of the killings. One of them reported to his superiors in London that on that night as many as 7,000 people had perished in Dhaka. And over the following months, the figure would run into the millions. And 10,000,000 Bengalis would flee to India in search of safety.

The genocide launched on 25 March has never been discussed in Pakistan. Successive governments in the country and its media, print as well as electronic, have never brought the truth before Pakistanis. It has always been a sanitised, self-serving version of the pogrom which has been offered to Pakistan's citizens. The Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report was quickly pushed under the rug by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whose guilt in the making of the genocide was as grave as that of the generals. 

All the men who planned and implemented the programme of Bengali murder and rape have gone to their graves. They never expressed any contrition for their criminal acts. Post-1971, Tikka Khan served in a number of positions till his death. Niazi dabbled in politics; Farman Ali was a minister under Ziaul Haq; Yahya Khan was accorded full military honours when he died in 1980; Bhutto went to the gallows in 1979. Everyone else with Bengali blood on his hands carried his guilt with him to the grave.

This morning, the call must be renewed for the genocide perpetrated in Bangladesh in 1971 to be acknowledged at a formal and global level. All efforts must be expended, politically and diplomatically, by the Bangladesh government and the country's public intellectuals to have an intense conversation begin in the councils of the world on what the Pakistan army did in 1971.

As we observe Genocide Day, it also becomes the moral responsibility of the state of Pakistan, of its government and of its armed forces to acknowledge the bloodletting their earlier generations inaugurated in Bangladesh. The message must go out loud and clear from Dhaka that as long as Pakistan shies away from recognising the truth of what its soldiers did in Bangladesh fifty-three years ago, there will be no closure to the issue.

25 March 1971 is a day written in infamy for those who believed they could suppress Bengali aspirations for self-expression. Their absence of shame, their notoriety, their failure to accept their criminality have condemned them to perdition for all time. It is for the men who govern in Islamabad today to redeem themselves and their country by saying, with folded hands and lowered eyes, 'sorry' to the people of Bangladesh.